We are Not Feminists?: The Legacy of the Montreal Massacre

Erin McGrath-Gaudet

I was only a young child when Marc Lepine strode into l’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal on December 6, 1989. I have no real memory of what happened that day. As a young woman now, I have only just begun to realize the huge impact that day had on my world.

When I began to review some old news stories about the Montreal Massacre for this article, one thing in particular stood out for me. When Marc Lepine entered one of the classrooms that day, he separated the men from the women and began to shout at the female students that he hated feminists; that he blamed them for ruining his life. One of the students who was wounded that day, Nathalie Provost, recounted from her hospital bed that she shouted back to Lepine, “We are not feminists. We are just women studying engineering.”

We are not feminists? By definition alone, I would consider any woman who was entering into a male-dominated field like engineering to be a feminist. I would certainly consider a woman strong enough to shout back at a madman with a gun pointed at her and her fellow female classmates to be a feminist. But as Provost explained to reporter Francine Pelletier five years after the massacre, she had honestly believed that the battles of feminism has already been fought and won; that in the late 1980s, as a woman she was free of any patriarchical shackles and could pursue whatever life she chose.

For the most part, Provost was and continues to be right. There was and is legal equality between the sexes. More women are entering male-dominated fields and universities. The wage gap between the sexes has decreased in a dramatic fashion. More men are choosing traditionally female occupations and the idea of a man taking an active role in raising children and doing housework is much more common and accepted. There has been real social change.

True feminism, in the Merriam-Webster sense of the word and often contrary to general misconception, has never been about women being superior or trying to gain an advantage over men. It is about equality between the sexes. Realistically, I know that there never really can be true equality. Biology has made us different. Being able to bear children means that women will be more likely to be single parents and suffer the economic hardship that is often associated with lone parent families. Being, in general, the physically weaker sex means that we are more likely to be the victims of physical and sexual abuse in relationships. Having different chemicals and hormones means that women often function on a more emotional level than men who tend to function on a physical level.

However, despite biology, we continue to believe that equality is a good thing. We recognize that there are inherent differences but that our opportunities should be the same. We should have access to the same educational opportunities and jobs, and receive the same wages. So why is the word “feminism” so unpopular? How did the word come to be perceived as representing antagonistic women who hate men, burn their bras, and refuse to shave their legs? Perhaps with the exception of the short lived “Girl Power” slogan of the Spice Girls, I can really not think of a moment in my lifetime where anything associated with feminism was “cool.”

For me the legacy of the Montreal Massacre is that even if we don’t like using the word “feminists,” we are feminists. Following the events of that day both women and men were outraged at the blatant act of violence against the female sex. Both women and men publicly mourned for the victims of the massacre. And both women and men were called to action to stop violence against women and create a truer equality. So even if we cannot freely use the word “feminist” to describe ourselves, December 6, 1989 etched into the Canadian psyche that true feminism is a goal that society as a whole should strive for and helped us all realize that there are real barriers which we must overcome to achieve that equality.